This specification relates to statistical processing circuits, including for example, circuits that perform soft logical functions.
Statistical inference makes use of statistics to draw inferences based on incomplete or inaccurate information. It may be useful in applications where information needs to be extracted from an observation of data that has been distorted in some way. For example, in communication systems, data transmitted over a communication channel, for example, in the form of radio signals, may be distorted by noise, interference, and/or reflections. Upon receipt of the radio signals, a receiver may employ statistical inference techniques to obtain and process soft (probabilistic) information in order to recover the original transmitted data from the distorted signals.
In some implementations, the processing of soft information may be implemented in the analog domain, for example, by use of analog continuous-time statistical processing circuits that perform soft logical functions such as soft Equals and soft XOR. In some examples, such analog circuits are constructed using traditional translinear circuits (e.g., summers and multipliers) in which probability distributions as represented by current signals may be summed and/or multiplied in the linear domain. Some of these translinear circuits are configured by exploiting the exponential I-V characteristics of particular types of transistors, for example, metal-oxide-semiconductor field-effect transistors (MOSFETs) operating in the sub-threshold region or bipolar junction transistors (BJTs).